Essex Hemphill Comes Out Twice

In the tradition of the very brave, I am posting an (incomplete) draft of a conference paper. I’ll be working on it as I travel to State College, PA, for the Celebrating African American Literature conference. Like all good academics, I believe that plane trips are opportunities to complete conference papers. Given I’ll be flying for 16 hours, that should be plenty of time.
*

It was probably the fall of 1996. I was newly gay, and back in the States after a summer of outing myself in Nairobi. I didn’t know much about being gay and had yet to become a regular at the Pegasus in downtown Pittsburgh, where, in the following months, I would dutifully show up on Tuesdays and Thursdays for under 21 nights and use a fake ID to get in on Fridays and Saturdays. The internet was still being invented and while strangers from New York, Toronto, and St. Louis tried to teach me how to be gay on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), I knew that true knowledge could only be found in one place: books. And so I made my way to the Barnes & Noble in downtown Pittsburgh, somewhat excited because internet truths had told me about cruising in bookstores. I did not yet know the distinction between bookstores and bookstores. And because I knew the most important thing about being gay was being out, I picked up an anthology edited by Patrick Merla: Boys Like Us: Gay Writers tell their Coming Out Stories. It was there I first encountered Essex Hemphill.

In a remarkable narrative, “The Other Invisible Man,” Hemphill describes his entry into black gay masculinity at the hands of an older church deacon called George. The narrative can be read as an elegy, and this in two ways. “The Other Invisible Man” ends with Hemphill learning of George’s death—it is a coming out story and a eulogy, a twining I want to mark and whose implications I will return to. Published after Hemphill’s death, it is also a self-written eulogy, an attempt to remember the self Hemphill hoped to become. George, the black George, had mentored the young Hemphill, teaching him how to read, how to think, how to be as a black gay man. Curiously, in a narrative about “coming out,” the question of the black George being out never comes up, or is deemed irrelevant. I say this as a placeholder—I will return to it.

I have specified black George because those familiar with the title story of Hemphill’s collection Ceremonies know about the white George. In “Ceremonies,” a young teenage Hemphill is inaugurated into homo-sex and the black masculinity it subtends by a white shopkeeper called George. “Ceremonies” is remarkable, first, for how it envisions inter-generational relationships: this relationship, Hemphill insists, was not one of abuse, even though George was in his forties and Essex was barely 14. And, second, for how it envisions homo-sex with a white man as providing entry into black masculinity. White George, Hemphill suggests, had offered his mouth and ass to other young black men and they had taken it, learning about sex, masculinity, and race through the body of the shopkeeper they would later disavow. Indeed, white George becomes a disavowed secret, allowing black teenagers to boast that they are no longer virgins, enabling them to speak of being sucked and fucking, without having to name the sex of their partners. I abbreviate a much richer narrative and more complex argument about the erotic silences that subtend black masculinities. I do so because I want to consider the relationship between these two Georges and to return, eventually, if circuitously, to the relationship between coming out and the elegy, that is, to the curious way narratives of freedom, understood as forms of subjection, rub against narratives of death in black queer imaginings.

For many years, I wondered if the narrative of the black George was meant to write over that of the white George: the white George was a sexual outlet for a horny teenager, a summer cumdump, if you will. The black George was a Socratic mentor, intent on shaping Hemphill’s mind and nurturing his potential. For a long time, it was difficult not to read one as better than the other: black George beats white George.

Yet, this narrative of over-writing is complicated by publishing histories: the white George features in the title story of Ceremonies, Hemphill’s official anthology. “Ceremonies,” the story, demands that we enter the entangled spaces of inter-generational and inter-racial sex to encounter Essex Hemphill, black gay icon extraordinaire. And “Ceremonies,” the story,” also refuses or complicates our desires to read erotic acts as life trajectories: it’s never clear whether any of the other black boys who used white George as their gateway into sex and power subsequently described themselves as gay or queer or even on the dl. Sex is clearly neither destiny nor life narrative.

I have suggested, albeit obliquely, that the narrative of the white George is about an entrance into black masculinity, mediated by the sexpertise or at least sex-availability of the white male body while the narrative of the black George is about an entrance into a black gay masculinity, structured as a Socratic exchange (with sex). Put crudely, one is a story about sex and the other is a story about sexuality. But even this reading is not yet, not quite, and perhaps quite wrong.

So let me start again.

It is no secret that what we term “the” coming out story is an improvisational performance calibrated to different spaces and audiences and urgencies. Commas shift, names change, acts are elaborated and diminished—a fuck turns into a kiss, a kiss into a handshake, the sweat of lust into the perspiration of anxiety. We speak of love rather than lust, partners rather than fuckbuddies, relationships rather than tricks. And our own certainties about what it is that we think we know—when we knew and how we knew—become unbound and re-bound: our stories leak into our memories, our bodies shift in the tales we tell, lines are crossed between the real and imagined. “Being out” feels more like being on a permanent threshold, perhaps one with a gloryhole. [note: I had been reading Lauren Berlant on gloryholes as I was writing this]

I notice the “I” that opened this paper has morphed into a “we” and I wonder about the interpellative seductions attached to that we. [note: the seduction of the aggregation conference-race, gender, class, sexuality-is that "we" becomes too easy, and I like to foreground the making of that "we" as part of a critical practice]

That “we” becomes difficult to sustain in each of the George narratives; that is, the modes of identification available to create something called community or collectivity become risky, if not impossible: the white George is the scene and the occasion for the creation and, sometimes, satisfaction of appetite for a variety of black teenage boys. Apart from George’s own insatiable appetite for young black men and sex, it’s not clear what else he shares with the young Hemphill. There is no “white George and Essex”—both become bound and unbound by appetite. One might argue that identity never coalesces, but that is not quite right and is perhaps irrelevant. [note: while I continue to share queer studies' critique of identity, too often that position risks smugness in ways that avoid the forms of embedding we practice]

Tellingly, the story of the white George ends with a teenage Hemphill abstaining from sex with his girlfriend: this scene is not a confirmation of gayness, but a more deliberate refusal to take up the black masculinity predicated on disavowing the white George. We might ask, again, what it means to route black sexual masculinity through the white George’s all-too-willing and all-too-available orifices. How might we think about black masculinity’s appetites? How might one write or imagine a black queer history of appetites? How might one imagine a queer history of the erotic secrets that subtend black masculinity? [note: I was thinking about DL and MSM discourses here, but I think there's something more to be said about black masculinity as an aggregation of "erotic secrets." It's a tease of a thought, and I have yet to parse it. It's not quite about the closet]

Perhaps it is precisely this queer history of erotic secrets that makes the narrative of the black George so fascinating. A church deacon, black George belongs to a group of men we might describe as “respectable,” perhaps even dismiss as respectable. And while we might want to like him because Hemphill liked him, it’s difficult to forget that he is a middle-aged man engaged in a sexual relationship with a 17 year old boy. I say this to mark the difficulty of reading this narrative easily, and also to suggest something about the difficulty of reading young people’s erotic testimonies seriously; it is difficult to learn to listen to the incoherence of erotic appetites. [note: all erotic appetites are incoherent, of course. Yet, our truncated discourses on young people's sexuality marks their appetites as even more incoherent. And this might not be untrue: the rapacious hunger for sex that marks many coming out narratives creates its own market. Many men pride themselves on satisfying the appetites of college-aged men]

The tenderness with which Hemphill writes of the black George further complicates our desires to read black George as another middle-aged closeted gay man taking advantage of unfocused youthful appetite. Such a reading would not be entirely wrong, but it is not one that Hemphill allows us to make. Indeed, one of the signal achievements of the narrative of the black George is the attention it pays to the importance of youthful erotic appetite: the story it tells of youthful desire.

Like a trick from Craigslist, I have made several promises so far about arguments to which I will return. And because I don’t want to be the trick who never shows up, let me attempt to return to at least two of these: first, the question of coming out and the notion of erotic secrets and second, the relationship between coming out as an act of freedom and its proximity to death in black queer imaginings.

Let me confess that I find myself uneasy talking about “coming out.” It feels so very pre-queer theory, so very pre-anti-identitarianism, so much like an embarrassing dance song from the 1990s that one now rushes to disavow, even as one remembers dance steps and blushes. In 1996, Patrick Merla wrote, “Coming out is the central event of a gay man’s life. It is at once an act of self-acknowledgement, self-acceptance, self-affirmation, intimately linked to how he views himself and how he interacts with the world.” As a good queer scholar, I am tempted to dismiss these remarks, to argue for a range of desires and appetites that do not so much consolidate the self as disperse it, to argue for the modes and practices of irony and disidentification and parody and celebration and mourning that so often comprise the experience of queer subjects. I find myself thinking more of erotic secrets than erotic disclosures, wondering what it might mean to narrate the stories of the white George and the black George. And I wonder what it means to tether oneself to those stories, as Hemphill does. To have them as anchors as one ventures forth into other modes of being and becoming.

And perhaps this is the queer scholar in me saying, too obviously, that the relationship between something known as “coming out” and something else that I am calling “erotic secrets” is complex.

Part of the complexity of the erotic secret is its proximity to death—to the forms of the elegy and the eulogy—that “u” matters. Within a long trajectory of black queer writing that might begin with Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” work itself through James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Another Country, and make its way through the fiction and poetry of Assotto Saint and Melvin Dixon, death haunts the black queer subject. Not simply death in the sense that many queer figures live endangered lives, and that it is precisely conditions of precarity that queer black lives, but death as a name for what can be remembered of one: the slide between the elegy and eulogy, the forms of remembering and un-remembering black queerness.
*

Despite my best efforts, I could not think of a way to conclude this presentation.

My already elliptical prose become even more elliptical. And I wondered at the structure of repetition and return that marked the paper, the circling that refused to move forward, toward a “clear” argument. It is, of course, part of academic labor that we hide our labor. We rarely discuss process and obstacle, and think of “mental blocks” and “forms of circling” as things to move beyond. This is not entirely wrong, of course. But I find myself wondering what our books and papers would look like if they chronicled our movements across space and time, our modes of consumption and production, our dreams and nightmares recorded in dream journals. In writing this, I wanted to note the “of course” and the “it must be repeated,” to think about obvious statements and their power to sustain particular lives and imaginations. I wanted to think, also, of the way that “coming out” is not something that one can get past, even as it is very tiring to belong to a group of people who are constantly asked to come out. I am ambivalent about the performance of coming out–in part, because I know it can go horribly wrong, but also, more substantially, because I think the demand that one come out can be incredibly violent. We live complex lives.

I wanted, also, to note something about memory and self: I did not have my primary texts with me. I wrote about stories that I had not read for some time–I think it’s been close to ten years since I read the Hemphill narrative in Merla’s collection. My ambivalence toward coming out is tempered by the force these narratives had in my life. I wanted to capture some of that force.

I could not approach death, though. The suggestive line between “elegy” and “eulogy” had to remain undeveloped. Proximity to death is never easy. Perhaps in the longer version of this.

Wangari’s Daughters

Over the past few years, it has been my immense privilege to meet and come to know women I now think of as Wangari Maathai’s daughters: Sitawa Namwalie, Wambui Mwangi, Shailja Patel, Njeri Wangari, Muthoni Garland, Mshai Mwangola—there are many others. I mean daughters in a sense perhaps best expressed in the founding Gikuyu myth: women of consequence who have the power to move and shape nations. Women for whom nations will be named and re-named.

I think of these women today on learning that Wangari Maathai has died. I think of them not only because of the sense of loss they must be experiencing, but because they are, to my mind, one of Wangari’s most precious legacies to Kenya and to the world. These are, I confess, overly bold claims to make for my friends. But they are claims that need to be made.

Wangari Maathai was the crazy tree-planting woman. She was a tree-hugger extraordinaire. While we were learning that Kenya was an “agricultural country” and greedy developers were trying to “industrialize” Kenya, Wangari was a beacon, teaching us that our earth mattered. She captured our imaginations by directing us toward other possible eco-futures, by thinking and living green before these expressions had been coined. Were it not for Wangari, Nairobi would have turned into the concrete, tree-less mess it is now much earlier in our eco-histories. Many of us owe her the Nairobi and Kenya we remember, when green city described our trees, not Safaricom billboards.

Yes, as I mourn her loss, I also celebrate her legacy: her precious daughters.

Wangari taught us how to be audacious: to speak and act fearlessly in the face of insurmountable odds. To care for futures yet to unfold. To care for strangers in worlds to come. To act with conviction. To care about the public spaces we share, and to ensure those spaces remained public. Indeed, the history of public space in Kenya is inextricably linked to Wangari’s name.

She made it possible for us to envision acting when we thought action was impossible. She acted to create beauty.

I celebrate her daughters because they continue to act and create new possibilities for being and acting in the world. As poets, actors, writers, scholars, performers, and photographers, they continue to expand our spaces for thinking and being. Like Wangari, they continue to believe in better possible futures. As they inhabit the spaces she helped to create, they also create other spaces for other women in Kenya and around the world to inhabit.

Like Wangari, they continue to believe in the potential of beauty in the world. For if Wangari was an eco-warrior, she was also an eco-artist, reminding us of the pleasures afforded by green trees on hot Nairobi days. Her daughters continue to believe in the power of art and beauty to shape social imaginaries.

Because Wangari believed in creating futures—a planted tree seedling is a promise to the future and a promise to the earth—it is only right to remember her as the promise she embodied, a promise that continues to live through her daughters.

Wangari, tata, I thank you for the Nairobi I am able to remember. And I thank you for your daughters.

**My mother said I should write something about Wangari as I was halfway through writing this post.

Tentatively

I find myself intrigued (and terrified) by certainty in Kenya. I’m fascinated by the complex blends of fundamentalist belief and fact dissemination that govern not only what can be said, but what can be heard as being said. Rarely does one hear or read “perhaps” or “maybe” or “might” or even catch hints of hesitation—we fear to be thought indecisive, and so we speak with a sense of rightness: fundamentalist belief meet fact dissemination.

This is why, for instance, question time in public forums is a performance of competing positions: one’s question is always some form of “don’t you agree with me?” To some extent, I am used to this mode of questioning—it’s a common feature of graduate seminars and too many academic talks. One need only get the right Marxist and psychoanalytic critics in the same space to witness ideological fortress building. Or, to offer an even more common example: one need only witness the seemingly never-ending canon/anti-canon debates.

In part, one can trace this certainty to the importance attached to the figure of “the teacher.” Within a certain Kenyan imaginary, the teacher is the figure who knows. One aspires to be known as “a teacher,” as mwalimu, as the subject who knows. Kenyan education seeks to produce and re-produce the subject who knows, even as, materially, the teacher must remain figured, abstracted. It is this subject who knows that is produced and re-produced within the NGO imagination.

In conversation, I am struck by how often I am inundated with facts and figures and answers. These are, I hasten to add, good things, or at least necessary things. Yet, the ways we imagine groups and individuals—men are, women are, Somalis are, Coastal people are, gays want, IDPs want, slum dwellers want—remind me too much of what Megan Vaughan has described as the aggregating function of colonial psychiatry and, by extension, colonial knowledge-making.

We know too much to allow silence and contradiction and hesitation to interrupt how and what we know. This, in part, comes from an NGO culture that wants “outcomes” to be part of a process of discovering the world. However, as James Baldwin might say, “People are not, though in our age we seem to think so, endlessly manipulable.” Or, perhaps, it is that we grant complexity to some of us: those educated enough to embody complexity, those hybrid Afro-cosmopolitans we aspire to embody. (The logic of developmentalism that subtends Afro-cosmopolitan hybridities makes me itchy: one ostensibly moves from ruralities to urbanities to internationalisms and becomes a more complex, rounded creature. It’s a nice fiction.)

How does one venture forth? Where might one find space for silence and hesitation? Even for surprise? (The reason I love Muthoni Garland’s writing is that it works in the realm of the unexpected. Surprise always lurks in wonderful ways.)

As a teacher, I understand some of the authority wielded by the figure who knows: one of my college teachers once pronounced that one could not be educated without reading “The Rape of the Lock.” Thus, we tripped through its heroic couplets for several weeks. It was great fun. Still, I spend much of my teaching time saying, “I don’t know” and “I’ll have to think about that,” teaching, I hope, through certain forms of hesitation. I try to teach my students to value hesitation and uncertainty, and not simply as theoretical gimmicks that prevent one from attempting difficulty.

There are other consequences to our infatuation with certainty. Much of our literature veers between satire and allegory, marked, too often, by a knowing wink. And while I understand the histories that have produced this work, I wonder about the spaces left for other forms of formal and tonal experimentation. I wonder about our gaps and ellipses: how we can insist on their existence, their usefulness. I find myself shrinking away from certainty, afraid of the violence it might perform in lifeworlds that need something else: space, care, shelter.

More and more often, I write about Kenya in “perhapses” and “mights” and “maybes.” I try to avoid the “musts” and “shoulds” that punctuate our national discourses, the never-ending prescriptives guaranteed to “fix us right up!” I understand, of course, that the public sphere is the site of multiple competing interests and voices and that one could read the various prescriptives that abound as a variety of “perhapses” and “mights” and “maybes.” One could, in other words, be generous.

I also realize that it is dangerously naïve to wish for less certainty as we head into an extended election season—whether elections are held in August, December, January, or March. We probably need more boldness and vision. Still, I find myself longing for a less blue-printed world, a less “outcomed” world, desiring, instead, a more hesitant and tentative world.

Slumdwellers

Since the Sinai event—it is ongoing—a startling consensus has emerged in Kenya’s newspapers, or perhaps simply the Daily Nation. It is probably best captured in Dr. Lukoye Atwoli’s statement:

Poverty has been made into the stock excuse for all the criminal activity we carry out, and we are bringing up children with a sense of entitlement that enables them to forcefully ask for handouts while warning us that the alternative is a life of crime.

We knew that slumdwellers were lazy and irresponsible—no doubt, this is why we entrust them with our children and our houses, as ayahs, nannies, domestics, gardeners, and askaris—now we know that they also feel “entitled.”

Good people, if you ever doubted that Kenya exists in a continual state of class war, welcome to the trenches.

Those who have tried to offer alternative ideas about poverty and social disenfranchisement have been dismissed as liberal do-gooders. Meanwhile, a line has formed behind Macharia Gaitho to defend his claims about slumdwellers. Macharia Gaitho, we are told, is a good guy. Why, some of the people who write for the DN have had drinks with him and can attest to his good nature. (“As Macharia Gaitho and I are colleagues, and have occasionally had a drink together, I can confidently say that he is neither insensitive nor elitist,” Rasna Warah.) Thus, his statements about slumdwellers are in no way intended to be malicious. They are hard, real truth. It is time we stopped coddling slumdwellers and let them know what’s what. Pampered slumdwellers need to get with the program, or they’ll be left behind as we head toward Vision 2030.

Slumdwellers are holding us hostage and they feel too entitled. (Since we don’t have welfare in Kenya, I am wondering where those writing against slumdwellers will find Cadillac-driving single mothers. No doubt, they will be found.) One thing is clear: we will no longer be hold hostage to the whims of irresponsible and entitled slumdwellers. We have drawn a line in the sand. If they cannot take care of themselves, so be it.

I wonder if these are the kinds of conversations that the Kenyan elite have about the rest of us. “If the Kenyan middle classes cannot figure out how to steal millions of shillings, then let them struggle. We cannot be responsible for their laziness and incompetence.”

The variously arrogant, condescending, and heartless statements circulating in our mainstream media about slums and slumdwellers should give us pause. The various consolidations around questions of personal responsibility and respectability, around middle class propriety and middle class values of “hard work” and “fair play” should similarly give us pause. One hears in all these statements that there are proper and right ways of practicing responsible citizenship, that slumdwellers have refused to fulfill the terms of their citizenship contracts, that we have little to no space and very little patience with those who refuse to be good wananchi.

Statements about slumdwellers circulate with such authority, such certainty that one can only stutter or remain silent in response. Slumdwellers have been surveyed by those who know—Dr. Atwoli is a psychiatrist!—and they have been found wanting. Criminal. Entitled. Unworthy.

Something ugly happened at Sinai.

Something even uglier continues to happen in our discourse on Sinai.

Current Obsession

Touhami Ennadre

The Gikuyu Soprano

The Gikuyu soprano is an amazing thing. Alternating between reedy thin-ness and shrill hearing-destroying, it is, I suspect, one of colonialism’s last (and worst) jokes. For many years, I did not know that the PCEA choir at my local church—dominated by Gikuyu women—was singing hymns that had words. Instead, their ventures into music always sounded like a flock of high-pitched locusts descending to consume hearing and sense. I thought God did not like words. He preferred sharp entreaties—if nothing else, I learned the sound of “crying out to God.”

The Gikuyu soprano had so deformed language that it became unrecognizable except as agonizing sound. One experienced penance and marveled at God’s grace and excellent hearing and patience. If nothing else, this piercing soprano also ensured one did not sleep during church services. (I have often imagined that the opera singer in TinTin, Bianca Castafiore, sings in a Gikuyu soprano.)

Four years of an all-boys school saved my hearing. And many years abroad helped to restore some of my belief in the power of the human voice not to wound in the name of music.

But one cannot escape the Gikuyu soprano forever.

It blares at me from radios owned by strangers, emerges from my neighbors’ joyful throats, steals into my dreams, disturbs my being.

Fissures and Futures: Reflections on Hay

A strange thing happened on the way to the Storymoja Hay Festival. By some fate of planning, the sessions I participated in ran alongside those featuring queer issues. While I was chatting about poetry and fiction and literature and the task of the writer and cultural production more generally with Sitawa Namwalie, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Ben Okri, Kenyan queers were discussing human rights principles and the relationship between homosexuality and spirituality.

I am, of course, thrilled that Storymoja created such a generous space for these discussions and offered two prime spots to Kenyan queers in an incredibly prestigious festival—so much so that one less-than-thrilled twit termed the Hay festival the Gay festival: it was on twitter.

Yet, I wondered at the ostensible divide posited between the cultural and the political, or, perhaps, the cultural and the social. (This “divide,” I should note, was breached several times, especially during an adult-themed storytelling session that I could not attend. Twitter chatter suggests that queer themes were represented at the session.) As much as we discussed poetry and its relationship to difficulty—war, death, loss—the discussions felt disconnected from queer discussions of the same issues. Granted, I am sure some folks tried to negotiate sessions and probably attended the poetry and queer sessions—so this is probably my own sense of loss at not having been able to attend the queer sessions or even, I suspect, to queer my own sessions (though I’m not sure what that would have entailed, given my head was still cloudy from a persistent cold—I think the little bugger is back).

More broadly, I am curious about the place of innovative cultural production in Kenya’s queer scenes—or the roles given to such production. While there are now online publications, some print publications, and, most recently, a film festival, the focus has remained on social activism and advocacy—necessary, of course. But I worry what happens when the tag to every photo or book or film starts with “homosexuality is illegal in Kenya” or documents the immense difficulties of being gay in Kenya. These, I hasten to add, are necessary things. And there are, I am told, glorious queer parties and scenes all over Nairobi, if not Kenya.

I wonder how that joy in living, that exuberance, can have a life within the stories that are told, the poems that are written, the art that is created. Not only joy, of course.

I worry that many—perhaps most—of our queer cultural resources come from outside Africa. I grew up with many of these and can attest to their good work. But I can also attest to their dislocating power. It is a difficult thing to saturate oneself with a queerness founded in other geographies and histories, even as those other glimpses can provide other possibilities. (Essex Hemphill has saved me several times.) I worry about the minds and psyches taking shape to the soundtrack of policy debates and political debates and religious debates and social debates: the debate and fight soundtrack can enliven for a while, set the adrenaline flowing, but only for so long. I’m not sure the debate-then-party or debate-or-party options are rich enough. Perhaps they are. (Speaking more generally, Nairobi has yet to generate enough ways of being young and adult that are filled with cultural or artistic richness, not to mention silent spaces.)

Now, I find myself wondering about the kind of conversations we might have had with a Thomas Glave (who I get to see in a few weeks at a conference) or a Michelle Cliff, a Dionne Brand or a G. Winston James, a Randall Kenan or a Carl Phillips. What kinds of diasporic enactments would have taken place? What musings on the body and desire? What claims could have been made for queer aesthetics within the Kenyan space? What claims can queer aesthetics make within the Kenyan space? What claims are they making now?

I wonder about the different kinds of emotional intensities that occurred across different tents at Hay: those who left inspired and warmed and touched by Sitawa and Yusef and Ben, having been told to embrace more of the world’s possibilities and those who, like some friends, found themselves beating their way through too-familiar thickets, attempting to create and find space for habitation.

Notes on Queer Scholarship

Somewhere around 2007, I found myself reading Alexander Crummell’s sermons. I use the strangeness of “I found myself” to register my sense, even now, of how unexpected that was. I was, after all, writing a queer dissertation. Surely, my objects of study could have been more, well, queer? There are no scandals in Crummell’s life, as far as I know. He had what might be called an “attitude” and was “elitist,” but was otherwise pretty much stuffy and conservative, dedicated to building a perfectly respectable black middle class that would be led by the elites—Du Bois gets his idea of the talented tenth most directly from Crummell, who was his mentor.

Crummell’s sermons are boring. Really, really boring.

This, I hasten to add, was a far cry from the sexy dissertation work I had once envisioned that would look at queer innovative poetries—Frank O’Hara to Assotto Saint to Carl Phillips. I still salivate over the sexiness of the project.

Perhaps living in the rural Midwest had de-sexified my thinking. Perhaps I saw in Crummell a future-yet-to-come, in which I would learn to speak like most Kenyan public speakers—ponderously, giving weight to each word, especially prepositions and conjunctions.

I knew in some obscure way that I was wary of subcultural queer sexiness—every time I read a book or article about a limited release movie or impossible to find record (on vinyl, of course) or once in a lifetime performance in an underground bunker that required 4 obscure passwords to enter and was asked to celebrate an ostensibly shared queerness or to take some paradigm from such practices, I flinched. It was a queerness that was too distant, unimaginable, fashioned, I thought, for other spaces, other people, other possibilities. And for all its sexiness, it did not seem to help me get past Crummell or Kenyatta.

Some of my anxieties over metropolitan subcultural sexiness have been captured by my friend Scott Herring—perhaps our shared Midwest experience produced a shared disorientation. His critiques of queer metronormativity resonate deeply.

I wondered then, and now, about the cluster of objects and events and situations deemed queer, about what felt like their relative inaccessibility, even and especially when I was in spaces that abounded with them. I felt awkward at the Hide/Seek exhibition in DC, for instance, unable to inhabit the shared space it sought to create, irritated, also, by my inability to inhabit this space. And while it’s all well and good to cite Lee Edelman’s early claim in GLQ that queer is not about “going home,” it’s a different thing to experience oneself constantly un-homed by the sexiness of one’s academic neighborhood—one might talk of queer academic gentrification, but that sounds a little too precious.

Even though my (in progress) book has a sexy title—frottage—it is not sexy. Indeed, for all that it lives in relatively sexy academic neighborhoods—the black diaspora and queer studies—it is the staid neighbor, a little appalled by the loud music and garish makeup of queer-er neighbors. I have been trying to think about the un-sexiness of this project as a kind of claim that might be made, as creating a kind of space in the neighborhood for the dowdy and unfashionable, and the impossible to avoid.

I am not, here, arguing against the life-wielding possibilities of queer subcultural events, objects, and situations. One finds resources to survive and thrive where they may be found. I am noting, instead, the kinds of anxieties produced by queer projects that privilege these subcultural events, objects, and situations as the guarantors of a better queerness, even where the better is more fashionably alienated. In reading much very sexy queer work, one experiences oneself as having failed to attain the hand stamp that will glow under special lavender lamps. The air becomes thin.

And so I found myself reading Crummell’s sermons. A mainstream, rather boring guy without a hint of sexual scandal. And from Crummell, engaging other non-sexy thinkers and non-sexy works in non-sexy ways. When I write about sex, and I do, I sound much more like Philip Kitoto than Susie Bright. I am not against sexiness, I add defensively (too defensively?). Nor am I against paths and gaps and crevices and scratches on obscure vinyl records—those geographies and soundtracks of queerness. Nor am I arguing for archives and methods of reading that “really matter.” Those who have read my academic work recognize my approaches as incredibly mainstream, sometimes leavened with creative comma use. And in the (perhaps outmoded) tradition of my discipline, I devote much time and space to “close reading.”

I wanted—still want—to find a way to address Kenyatta’s claim that there was “no homosexuality among the Gikuyu,” and I knew (or thought) I could not respond to this claim without crossing the busy highways where his thinking is a major form of currency. (Those who have seen traders on Kenya’s roads will grasp my meaning.) Even when I attempted to use side paths, I found them heavily thicketed, brambled by guerrilla histories, obstructed by machete-wielding revolutionaries. I wanted, still want, to probe what I have elsewhere described as miri ya mikongoe, the fictional roots of cultural and other forms of belonging to which we cling so tenaciously to ward against deracination, to account for the forms of embedding that we cannot do without, and not necessarily out of duty (this I take from Elspeth Probyn, Marlon Ross, Joseph Beam, and Elizabeth Povinelli).

And so, much like Ngugi’s Waiyaki, I find myself entering the hut of night-masked elders, aware of the good they desire for me—this way lies prosperity—and aware, also, of the inchoate desires that cannot turn toward that good, desires that intuit the cost of that good. (To think of what I often describe as normativity as a “good” requires some major re-orientation, but to think of it as a “bad” has come to seem too easy, and the too-easy makes me itchy. And, perhaps, it is that “normativity” does not translate well over different time-spaces, and my own predilection for dowdiness asks for space.)

Strange alliances are forged in dark spaces, and it’s striking how the demands of tradition-bound normativity can feel akin to those of subcultural sexiness.

Thoughts on Sinai

Informalisation of the economy has bred careless behaviour, indiscipline, and disorderliness. The way we drive unnecessarily aggressively and without regard to traffic regulations, our propensity to walk on the road rather than the footpath, the matatu playing loud music and making maximum noise with the horn in silence zones, are all examples of lack of discipline in contemporary society.—Jaindi Kisero

The point is that the Sinai pipeline tragedy was not an accident. It is the reward of impunity.

We tend to think of impunity as a culture associated with the high-and-mighty who regularly get away with mass murder and grand larceny.

But the fact is that the culture of impunity extends right to the bottom of the pile.—Macharia Gaitho

Slum dwellers go by many names: maid, ayah, domestic; petty trader, informal trader, the guy who makes things; unskilled labor, factory workers, exploited masses; my first sexual experience, my husband’s piece on the side, my wife’s satisfaction, my heart’s desire. They are intimately familiar with our lives and habits, knowing where we hide our booze, where we “store” the sugar and flour, how often we have sex, even the shape and quality of our bowel movements. They know how to detect lust and avarice, compassion and corruption. For too many of us, they are object lessons—“there but for the grace of . . .” while for others of us they are destinies. To them, we tell secrets that we believe will not travel where they matter.

Slum dwellers matter too much, and not at all.

What, then, does it mean to mourn as a nation for slum dwellers?

It is a gesture that means too much, and nothing at all.
*
Beginning tomorrow, more precisely Friday, I will be surrounded by poetry at the Hay Festival: workshops with Yusef Komunyakaa and Ben Okri and, later, conversations with Komunyakaa, Okri, Sitawa Namwalie, and the many other Kenyan poets who will be there. One or several of these poets will have taken up the incredible, perhaps impossible, challenge of writing about Sinai: mountain and slum, site of redemption and loss, site of plenty and sacrifice.

Moses descended from Sinai to smite idolaters. Kenya’s politicos descend on Sinai for photo ops. Serpents crawled along staffs, got tired of hanging out, and went hunting.
*
I want to stay, for a while, with the intimacies we share. I want, in other words, to refuse the “them” and “they” and “slumdweller” designations that have saturated the media and this post. I want, also, to unsettle the “we” understood as a “nation,” the “we are Kenyans together” that feels craven and opportunistic. Nations may be conjured up at sites of collective mourning, but they just as quickly fragment and dissipate. I want to avoid, as well, the too-easy turn from grief to grievance.

I want to stay with the intimacies we share to unsettle ongoing consolidations and sedimentations, especially the very frightening rhetorics of personal responsibility advanced by Gaitho and Kisero. And I also want to stay with the intimacies we share to avoid Moses-like pronouncements about sin and impunity.
*
Our intimates have died.

Wambui Mwangi and Melissa Williams: Gender and Representation in Kenya

Here

and

Here